Should I switch to the newest channel?

TikTok, Pinterest or whichever new platform comes along. Are those the golden opportunities the experts promise, or is it better not to waste your energy on them?

A new channel has real benefits. It’s just that the risk lies somewhere almost nobody is looking: not on the new channel itself, but in the rest of your marketing.

What makes a new channel attractive

• There is still little competition, as few companies have the channel in their mix yet.
• When a platform hypes up, you get a lot of users in a short space of time that you can reach in a new way.
• Many users and little competition means low advertising costs.

If you can integrate such a channel well into what you are already running, you can buy cheap conversions there temporarily. That is a real advantage and no sales talk.

The disadvantage that everyone sees: the costs are mounting

The more users a platform attracts, the more businesses target it. Advertising space is limited and the highest bidder gets the spot. If user growth stagnates while the demand for advertising space continues to rise, prices go up.

So the question is not whether that will happen, but whether your proposition can handle it when it does. Is the channel an advantageous addition, or will you soon be dependent on a cost advantage that disappears?

The downside that almost nobody sees: you are polluting your other channels

This is the point where it really gets expensive, and it takes place outside the new channel.

A young platform has a young targeting algorithm. It has collected little data yet and therefore does not yet know well to whom it should show your advertisement. The result: your campaign is shown to many non-relevant people.

In itself that is not a problem, because those impressions are cheap. It only becomes expensive when those irrelevant people click. Then they become visitors to your website. And visitors to your website end up in your retargeting audiences.

From that moment on, you advertise to those irrelevant people via your other channels, where there is a lot of competition and the click is therefore much more expensive. You pay on your most expensive channel for an audience that you accidentally collected on your cheapest channel.

How to prevent that

Exclude visitors from the new channel from your retargeting audiences, or build those audiences on a signal that actually means something: people who stayed on the page for a certain amount of time, viewed multiple pages, or took a step in the form. That naturally filters out accidental traffic.

In addition, do not just look at the cost per click on the new channel, but at what happens afterwards. If that traffic stays for less than a few seconds, you are not buying reach, but noise.

Golden opportunity or pitfall?

Our advice is: go for stable growth. If the platform is a cost-effective addition to what you are already running, without you leaning on it, then it is worth considering. However, make sure you protect your retargeting audiences.

If the channel is only interesting because of the low costs, and without that advantage you wouldn't be profitable, realise that that advantage is temporary. In that case, you are better off putting your energy into an offer that makes money on every channel. What it comes down to is: is your offer strong enough?